Groin Kicks Scrubbed as McMahon Softens Connecticut Image

U.S. senate contenders Chris Murphy, left, and Linda McMahon debate at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Connecticut in Mansfield, Connecticut. Source: Peter Morenus/UConn Photo via Bloomberg

Oct. 18 (Bloomberg) -- When Republican Linda McMahon ran
for U.S. Senate in 2010, her Connecticut opponents gleefully
highlighted images from 2001 showing the former head of World
Wrestling Entertainment Inc. in the ring, kicking her husband,
Vince, in the groin.

Now in a closely matched second Senate campaign, the
company her husband still runs is scrubbing the most violent and
salacious clips from the Web, ensuring that they can’t be used
in political attacks.

The disappearing video segments show just how far McMahon,
64, has come from her 2010 loss. Drawing more than $13 million
from her own fortune, she has blanketed Connecticut with
advertisements that portray her as a kindly grandmother focused
on the future. Her campaign has also pummeled opponent Chris
Murphy, a Democrat, as a deadbeat congressman.

“She’s defined the race” for the seat Senator Joe
Lieberman, an independent, is giving up, said Gary Rose, who
teaches politics at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield,
Connecticut. “Without the resources, it would be a completely
different contest.”

Republican Hope

McMahon, who helped build Stamford, Connecticut-based WWE
into a global entertainment franchise, is giving her party hope
for a win in a state that hasn’t sent a Republican to the Senate
since 1982. Democrats control the chamber, 53-47, and a McMahon
win would help the Republican bid for a majority. While
President Barack Obama leads challenger Mitt Romney in recent
voter surveys by as much as 14 percentage points in Connecticut,
several show her in a close race with Murphy, 39.

A University of Connecticut/Hartford Courant poll released
today showed 44 percent of likely voters backing Murphy to
McMahon’s 38 percent, with 17 percent undecided. The survey had
Obama leading Romney 51 percent to 37 percent. A Siena College
Research Institute survey released yesterday put Murphy at 46
percent to McMahon’s 44 percent.

Cory Bliss, McMahon’s campaign manager, called the UConn
poll “completely flawed,” in a statement today, saying it
oversampled Democrats at the expense of independents, who make
up the state’s largest voting bloc. The pollsters surveyed 265
Democrats, 187 Republicans and 87 independents.

Reviving Attacks

The Connecticut Democratic Party last month tried reviving
attacks on McMahon using old video clips from WWE productions,
which have been broadcast on cable television for years.

One segment, subsequently disabled online, began with the
statement, “What Linda McMahon doesn’t want you to see.” It
showed two female wrestlers stripping to their underwear in the
ring and fondling each other before two male wrestlers appear
and beat them unconscious during the televised show.

“The way that she demeaned women in the ring is abhorrent
to thousands of women across this state,” Murphy said today in
a candidates’ debate in Hartford. He also said McMahon is
responsible for making society worse “by selling sex and
violence to our kids.”

Another now-removed clip showed simulated sex acts between
a male and female wrestler, first in the ring and then in what
appears to be a funeral home with the woman in a casket.

Stray Clip

There’s at least one segment still on Google Inc.’s YouTube
website that shows Linda McMahon, dressed in business attire,
entering the wrestling ring to kick Vince McMahon in a staged
squabble over control of the business.

“We wanted to let voters know about the content of the
WWE, because that’s how she made her money and that’s how she’s
financing her campaign,” said Elizabeth Larkin, a spokeswoman
for the state Democratic Party.

By removing links to “edgier footage” from digital
platforms, the company said it would “better reflect our
current family-friendly brand of entertainment,” in a Sept. 13
statement.

“Some of this footage has been misused in political
environments without any context or explanation as to when it
was produced,” the company said.

As for efforts to scrape the video segments from the
Internet, the company said: “Any assertion that WWE is
coordinating with Linda McMahon’s U.S. Senate campaign is false;
to do so would be unlawful,” in a statement provided by Tara
Carraro, a spokeswoman in Stamford.

Distracting Voters

By using the clips, Democrats were trying to distract
voters from Murphy’s record, Todd Abrajano, a McMahon spokesman,
said this week.

The Republican’s campaign has focused attacks on how
Murphy, who first won his House seat in 2006, missed 80 percent
of his congressional committee meetings during the financial
crisis, and on lapses in his personal finances.

Murphy, from Cheshire, serves on the Foreign Affairs and
the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The UConn poll
shows him benefiting from a lead over McMahon among likely women
voters, 50 percent to 32 percent.

“When we polled on this race last month, there wasn’t much
of a gender gap,” Jennifer Necci Dineen, the survey’s director,
said in a statement.

Connecticut’s five U.S. House members are all Democrats,
and the party controls the governor’s office and state
Legislature. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans almost
2-to-1 in the state, while 42 percent are independents, more
than either major party.

“A Democrat is always going to have an advantage” in
Connecticut, said Ronald Schurin, who teaches politics at UConn
in Storrs.

Campaign Spending

Outside organizations have spent almost $4 million in the
campaign, much of it to attack McMahon and counter her assaults
on Murphy, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive
Politics in Washington. Some TV spots paint her as a corporate
profiteer who cared little for employees, firing 10 percent of
them in 2009, while making $46 million that year.

Schurin said that while Murphy hasn’t run an effective
campaign, “the tide is very much moving in his direction,”
particularly since the candidates started their four debates on
Oct. 7. The final debate was today in Hartford.

“I am voting for Chris Murphy and tonight’s performances
had a lot to do with it,” Patrick Williamson, 30, a registered
Democrat from West Hartford, said on Oct. 11 after attending the
candidates’ second debate. “Linda convinced me not to vote for
her. My overwhelming conclusion from seeing them debate issues
in person is that Linda is not equipped to be a U.S. senator.”

Hulk Hogan

A North Carolina native, McMahon resigned as president and
chief executive officer of WWE in 2009. The company, which began
growing rapidly in the 1980s as wrestling characters such as
Hulk Hogan, played by Terry Bollea, emerged as celebrities, had
a market value of $625.7 million as of yesterday. It employs
about 600 people.

She left the company before her first Senate run in which
she donated or loaned more than $46 million to the campaign. She
lost to Democrat Richard Blumenthal, the former state attorney
general.

In that race, McMahon was dogged by questions about WWE
shows and practices, including allegations that some performers
took steroids, painkillers and other drugs to stay in the ring.
Vince McMahon was indicted on charges of distributing steroids
to wrestlers in 1993 and was acquitted. Congress also
investigated steroid use in pro wrestling in 2007, after one of
WWE’s wrestlers, Chris Benoit, killed his wife, son and himself.

Sour Economy

McMahon is banking on economic concerns among voters in
Connecticut, where unemployment jumped to 9 percent in August
from 7.7 percent in April, while the national rate hovered at
8.1 percent over that period.

McMahon has spent the past two years recasting her image
while also building support among local Republican groups, using
what she learned from 2010 to shape her candidacy with “a new
narrative,” according to analysts such as Sacred Heart’s Rose.

“It’s been a combination of her own personal narrative and
that she has effectively defined for the electorate who her
opponent is,” Rose said.

That strategy may pay off.

“I’m a registered Democrat, but they couldn’t get my
vote,” said Ed Welshock, 67, a former lumber salesman from
Mystic. “I met her. She’s not the person they make her out to
be. She’s really a nice person. I’d rather have her than
Murphy.”